As game makers, watching millions of passionate players get their hands on our game has been incredibly exciting and – in many ways – inspiring. Believe us when we say that your participation is making the game better, and we’re humbled that so many of you took time to not only try the Star Wars Battlefront II Beta, but to share your thoughts with us too.

The Beta was just a small piece of what we're making. Yes, there’s more content (new locations, heroes, modes, and the all-new single-player campaign), but we heard your feedback loud and clear after the first game. There is more player choice in multiplayer through a deeper progression system and an evolving, event-driven live service that keeps the community together by moving away from Season Pass and having all new gameplay content free for all Star Wars Battlefront II players.

Rest assured, we’re continuing to listen to you coming out of Beta. We’re taking a look at some of the most discussed topics, from Crates and progression to Strike mode (which we're considering changing to a best of three), the Specialist’s Infiltration ability (which might be a little too overpowered) and more. Oh, and the First Order Flametrooper needs some work – we agree he could use a little more... firepower. We are also looking into more ways to allow players to stay and play together as a team – for launch, we’ll have a new feature for you that rewards all players in a spawn wave. These are just a few examples of how your feedback is helping to shape the game.

We know you have a lot of questions about Crates and progression, so we want to clarify a few things, as the complete system was not in the Beta and will continue to be tuned over time:

There are many things you can earn in the game, including weapons, attachments, credits, Star Cards, Emotes, Outfits and Victory Poses.

As a balance goal, we’re working towards having the most powerful items in the game only earnable via in-game achievements.

Crates will include a mix of of Star Cards, Outfits, Emotes or Victory Poses.

Players earn crates by completing challenges and other gameplay milestones, or by purchasing them with in-game credits or Crystals, our premium currency.

If you get a duplicate Star Card in a crate, you will get crafting parts which you can then use to help upgrade the Star Card of your choice.

And lastly, you have to earn the right to be able to upgrade Star Cards and unlock most Weapons. You can only upgrade or unlock them if you have reached a high enough rank, which is determined by playing the game.

We also have heard some players are looking for a way to play where all players will have the same set of Star Cards with flattened values. Like everything else, we will be continually making necessary changes to ensure the game is fun for everyone. We will work to make sure the system is balanced both for players who want to earn everything, as well as for players who are short on time and would like to move faster in their progress towards various rewards.

And you, our community, will play a big role in the evolution of the game. Whether it’s comments on our forums or posts over social media, we’re listening. Your feedback makes a difference, and your passion is what keeps us creating.

Again, we want to thank you for taking part in the Beta and helping us make sure that the launch will be, to quote a certain masked Sith Lord, a day long remembered. We’ll have much more to share with you before we see you on the battlefront in November.

"Notice how we we bury the the pay-to-win crate issue with meaningless platitudes about how we are 'listening to the feedback'? Truth is that core pay to win system isn't really going anywhere. We need our dolla dolla bills."

"However we don't want to make too many waves this close to launch so we need to give the impression we care enough to make people FEEL like we might change the whole Pay To Win system so it doesn't become a reason not to buy the game. By the time players realize we never planned on making any changes it'll be too late since we'll have all the money. People can either fuck off or pony up the $1,000 to compete against the other folks who shelled out their $1,000 so they could pwn the poor people."

"The best part is the fantasy that you'll be able to keep up by "playing the game and not spending a dime" HA! The packs you'll be rewarded by playing are "standard" packs which have a 1 in 1000 chance to pull a legendary card while having a 999:1000 chance of a lowly common card as opposed to buying cards packs which guarantee the player rare or legendary cards. Eventually stingy players will get so frustrated being steamrolled they'll quit or pay. Either way after the first 60 days worth of revenue it's win-win for us."

I gotta ask vallor... What makes you think this game (or for that matter any game made recently) is designed to be fair? The very nature of this game in particular is made to be as uneven as possible. Why are loot crates the tipping point for you?

This isn't chess.

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I gotta ask vallor... What makes you think this game (or for that matter any game made recently) is designed to be fair? The very nature of this game in particular is made to be as uneven as possible. Why are loot crates the tipping point for you?

This isn't chess.

IMO every game with a competitive aspect against others should be as close to chess (or Go, or checkers or whatever) as possible. Your mastery of the mechanics againsts someone else. Allowing people to pay their way past the skill gap is lazy. One stretch example is when people buy accounts in MMOs. They don't learn and that player becomes a liability.

Another example is a football team who can only afford shitty gear playing against a football team in the finest gear available. It is an advantage because the better equipped players can push it farther without being at as much risk.

In the case of this game the difference between someone who played a hero for a few hundred hours can still be massively outgunned by someone who played way fewer hours but dumped $1,000 into the game to give themselves exponentially more power. Skill gap only takes you so far.

That's why, on the rare occasions I play PvP games, I prefer ones which focus on cosmetic purchases or rewards than power increase reward. Overwatch, most of the battle royale games, most of the MOBA games, and etc..

Again though, this isn't chess, this isn't football, the game by its very design (without lootboxes) is made to be as unfair as humanly possible in each and every encounter.

People talk about it like they are going up against someone 1v1, or hell 2v2, 3v3 even. This will never happen. This is you and a random number of your guys, slamming into a random number of opponents at random intervals. More so, their random number of guys might include a hero, or a reinforcement, they might have a tank, you might have 2. You're piddling clone trooper isn't going to kill Bobba Fett in a "fair" fight.

Furthermore, you say that someone who has played a few hundred hours can be "massively" outgunned by someone who has only played a few but dumped tons of cash into it. Why do you feel this way? I feel from my time in the beta the exact opposite would be true. New players usually ran straight for objectives (when they played them) and more experienced players knew where to set up/how to funnel opponents, hell in the case of the Strike I saw that some would grab the objective, and then not go for the drop off point, but sit in an easily defensible location and wait for new players to come right to them and into a trap. I'm curious what situations you ran into in the beta that lead you to come to the other conclusion.

More than that, you just listed some of the least competitive games there are. Battle Royale games (PUBG/Fortnite/H1Z1) are completely random! No amount of skill is going to save a bad drop. If you're talking LoL any player can drop cash and get the latest and greatest (unbalanced) hero, and most have in game items that further unbalance the playing field (so much for Chess right? My knight took a pawn so now I can buy him two moves a turn) Overwatch has 1 button kill everything ultimates (Yah... Skill). But guess what? I play all those games too just cause they are fun. But truly competitive? Not in a million years.

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I Hear Death Is The Only Cure For Stupidity... Would You Like To Be Smarter?

No, the problem with the way Battlegrounds and other games which allow you to buy power isn't that others can't still win with skill, or the randomness doesn't still have a positive or negative impact on you or them.

The problem is they are playing chess and while you are set up with Rooks, Knights, Bishops, King, Queen and Pawns they've been able to spend the money to replace every one of their pieces with Queens.

BTW: almost everything else you mentioned is easily mitigated by skill and knowledge, lack of large scale balancing which usually follows within a short amount of time, or has counters actually built into the game to actively... well counter the effect. Knowing when and how to use them is known as "skill".

Again, it's not chess and it's not made to be chess. It's more like you, and a random number of other people are setting up your pieces (some of which are pawns, rooks, knights, bishops, etc) and a random number of other people are setting up their pieces. Maybe some people spent extra money and got a queen, maybe some spent extra money and only got a pawn, maybe you were just gifted a queen without spending a dime. Maybe every piece on your side is a queen and every piece on their side a pawn. How do you go into that situation expecting anything even remotely approaching fair competition? Why would you?

I'm not arguing the other games have no skill component at all, I'm saying that they cannot be a truly fair competition (as you seem to believe) by their very nature. That's why say in LoL, or Overwatch, new heroes/maps are removed from ranked play, because they recognize that there can be no fair competition. Things are introduced unbalanced, by simply being introduced. Any singular random element removes all pretenses of fair competition. At any one point, they are by design, unfair. Chess is static, these games aren't.

It seems like you're upset people can pay for randomness. But that's the game, it's entirely random. So what was your experience with the beta was that lead you to believe what you do?

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Last edited by Mozain; 10-14-2017 at 09:10 PM..
Reason: Missing a word.

Naw, what's got my panties in a bunch is they clearly deliberately threw balance out the window for the money grab.

I am using the standard of "all things being equal" which is the only way to create a scientific baseline for balancing and building data driven scenarios. The empirical data says "all things being equal" someone who spends $1,000 on the game WILL be objectively better than someone who doesn't.

You're using the standard of "things will never be equal because things change in game" which is subjective, anecdotal, and has infinite number of permutations that can never be accounted. This is great for creating bitter players who "only lost cause they didn't spend as much money" or if you want to get your game designed by Reddit.

What they've done in allowing lots of money to buy lots of power is effectively just flipped over the board and said "Fuck it!"

NOTE: I'm not saying how players experience the game in the "things will never be equal" is not valid my point is EA/Dice apparently doesn't give a shit if their money grab makes that experience shittier than it should be.

I am using the standard of "all things being equal" which is the only way to create a scientific baseline for balancing and building data driven scenarios. The empirical data says "all things being equal" someone who spends $1,000 on the game WILL be objectively better than someone who doesn't.

Power is capped in the game. A guy with 40 plat specialist cards is equally strong as a guy with 3 plat specialist cards. If having more than three cards provided more advantage or if you were able to switch cards on the fly... but they don't and you can't. Every card you equip means there's a bunch of cards you can't equip, so every situational advantage you have isn't going to cover all of your situational weaknesses.

You can boost your ship's armor, but you can't do that and boost your targeting systems, your torpedo yield, your targeting defense, cooldown on primary weapons, damage per shot on primary weapons, etc. Putting RoF+ and damage plus with heat reduction will help me take targets down faster, but that isn't going to make my fighter handle torpedos or sustained damage any better. Star cards are also your alternate gear equips (which didn't have upgrades in beta), so you have to choose between stuff like ion grenades or having an extra buff on your officer's shout.

There aren't any cards that give you a linear, all-situations against any other card advantage. Even the invuln on the Boba card everyone's going on about is super conditional. People should be thinking of them as specializations or modifications rather than buffs. You're only objectively at a disadvantage if someone's using your exact same loadout with higher upgrades, but there are a lot of cards.

I am using the standard of "all things being equal" which is the only way to create a scientific baseline for balancing and building data driven scenarios. The empirical data says "all things being equal" someone who spends $1,000 on the game WILL be objectively better than someone who doesn't.

You're using the standard of "things will never be equal because things change in game" which is subjective, anecdotal, and has infinite number of permutations that can never be accounted. This is great for creating bitter players who "only lost cause they didn't spend as much money" or if you want to get your game designed by Reddit.

But it's a standard that cannot exist, you're using a hypothetical which is about as far away from "scientific baseline" as you can get. You want some objective facts? Battlefront II is an asymmetrical, multiplayer, objective based game with no 1v1 mode. "All things being equal" cannot exist.

My standard is the one that factually exists. If you want to argue against that, well go ahead, but it's just meaningless noise.

You keep equating this "Money=Power" thing, but that's as hypothetical as the rest of your argument. Here's a hypothetical for you, it's possible for someone to drop tons of cash on the game and get only costumes and emotes. How does that fit into your "Money=Power" argument?

Another objective fact is this system is better for every party except the cash gamblers than the one used in Battlefront 2015, where you could just flat out buy the better cards in packs and still had to pony up for DLC/season pass/maps.

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This is an impossible discussion to have when folks aren't seeing the forest through the trees.

"But when I played this one time this happened and then this other time..." isn't how it works.
"But what about, but what about, but what about..." theorycrafting doesn't make a very straight forward problem go away.

In the game you can acquire things which give you power far exceeding that of players without these things.

You can significantly improve your power by increasing the number of these things you have available to mix and match

The best way to do this is to get more "things" to mix and match is to buying them with real money.

The more money, the more opportunity to get the bestest stuff. Just like when people buy boxes and boxes of Magic cards. Sure they miss one or two ultra rares but chances are they'll get just about everything else despite RNG

This isn't rocket surgery.

EDIT: And the reason I care now and I didn't before was because I didn't give a shit about the last one. This one I actually think I may want to play so now I have seen their shoddy player hostile design and business decisions.

"And then if these two players meet at this exact distance away, and they both have the exact same skill level, and they both are using the heavy class with that one gun, but not the gun with that one attachment, and there is no one else around, and they are both using that one card except one is at level 4 and one is at level 3..."

Everything you're saying is only half true though. "Far exceeding", "significantly improve" is just hyperbolic, care to back that up with some examples?

I'd argue number 3 for sure. The best way is to get them with challenges and playing. That's free! Money talks and while some people will gamble, I doubt a significant majority will to any significant degree.

Number 4 is right on. But unlike magic, you can get the "bestest" stuff without paying a cent. So since we're talking possible "eventuals" here, both players will eventually get everything.

The fact is that any bonuses will be almost completely unnoticeable due to the sheer amount of variables. It doesn't matter if you died to the one guy who had +10% bonus to whatever skill he was using when you have 10 other people shooting at you at the same time with who knows what.

If you were concerned about player hostile design you would have rallied against the last one. Nothing was more player hostile than needing to pay for new heroes, new maps (which no one played on, but you know, bundled with the heroes...), and outright buying the best cards.

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I Hear Death Is The Only Cure For Stupidity... Would You Like To Be Smarter?

Still buying it. I think because I know I will never pay for their loot boxes, having loot boxes that unbalance the game doesn't impact me as much.

I think I'm also conditioned by Heroes of the Storm to play against people who are more powerful than I am. Some characters in Heroes are seriously weak and will just get ground into paste if they run up against the wrong toon. You can still have fun with it and learn the work-arounds that give you the advantage.

We know EA is just doing this system to generate tons of cash from the suckers. I think since I know I'll never give them a dime beyond the cost of the game it isn't really bothering me all that much.

(And as I mentioned a couple of times, I need a new game now that Destiny 2 turned out to be a big washout.)

__________________I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.